A Young Person’s Guide to Heartbreak—an industrial album about love, lust, and the bitter dissolution of relationships?  Didn’t Battery Cage get the memo?  Industrial albums can only be about robots, war, serial killers, stompy boots, or some combination therein—who do these guys think they are?  Personally, I think they’re geniuses for bringing a more human element to what is otherwise an often tired set of genre conventions.  Many of the elements of past Battery Cage albums are present on A Young Person’s Guide to Heartbreak, but their sound has been deeply refined since World Wide Wasteland.  The beats are bigger, the guitar riffs heavier, the songs tighter, and the vocals broach emotive territory usually left unexplored by this style of music.  Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some unexpected moments on the record.  The melancholic piano, acoustic guitar, and strings of “This Life Sucks.  I’m Leaving” is quite a leap for a band with a reputation for hardcore live performances, but here it functions as the perfect resolution to the album’s greater themes.  The album is also remarkably cohesive; each song feels like an absolutely necessary piece of the whole.  Somehow Battery Cage have managed to turn the very personal emotions of heartbreak into something of near-epic proportions.  It’s a guide to heartbreak and a guide to how invigorated industrial music can be when it pushes in new directions.

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